I was astounded at the sensitivity of my friend’s Magellan GPS, a bulky unit by today’s standards, but impressive in that way one’s first brush with a new technology can be — with only a shallow understanding of how it worked, there was a whiff of magic about this little box of tricks.

It pleased me no end, that simply by holding the receiver out in front of me, and walking, the grainy icon of a little man on the GPS’ screen started moving his legs up and down. When I stopped walking, so did the little man. Having been shown the plan-view that displayed one’s path as if on a map, my next task was immediately apparent. Walk out a giant “P” for Paul, in the field adjacent to our picnic spot. A few minutes later (and having garnered some strange looks), I proudly displayed my wobbly initial, before surrendering the GPS to its owner.

Not long after, I bought a GPS for myself. The funny thing is, I hardly ever used it. It turned out that making the little man’s legs move up and down, and drawing out my initials by walking round a field, was actually about as excited as I could get when it came to personal GPS receivers. The battery life was short, it often took an age to start up, and I could never be bothered with the faff of programming in waypoints to use it for navigation on the hill. More importantly, I was (and am) competent at navigating with a map and compass when needed, in rough terrain and poor conditions.

Perhaps the biggest let-down was the fact that the device I bought couldn’t be easily connected to a computer for uploading recorded position data. Not unless one was prepared to pay a king’s ransom for Garmin’s bespoke cable that is. I thought this was a bloody cheek, and would have nothing to do with it. USB was well enough established at the time that Garmin could easily have provided the unit with a USB connector.

My Garmin e-Trex was still sat gathering dust on the shelf a couple of years ago, while I was pacing my way across the top of Aonach Mòr with map and compass in borderline white-out conditions, accurately threading a zig-zag route between the steep drop-offs to both east and west that define this “great ridge”.

It turns out that my initial GPS-drawing attempt (a “P” with a maximum dimension of about 50 metres) was rather modest. Nick Newcomen’s just raised the bar a little:

World's largest writing

You can read more about the project at worldsbiggestwriting.com.

A bimble through Tideswell Dale, Miller's Dale, and Cressbrook Dale

I chose not to take my camera, so can’t illustrate this post with the small but impressive outcrop of Peter’s Stone (also known as Gibbet Rock — from which the public display of convicted murderer Anthony Linguard’s remains apparently drew crowds from far and wide in 1815); nor the airy view over Cressbrook Dale at elevenses that made the cocoa-pop caramel shortbread taste even better.

However, I was equipped with a GPS Datalogger, whose unblinking geo-locating eye was recording the day’s events, albeit from an unusual perspective. This does beg a question though…

What the hell’s a GPS Datalogger?

A GPS Datalogger is similar to a standard personal GPS receiver (typified by the popular Garmin eTrex devices). Where a Datalogger differs, is that it does away with a screen showing where you are, along with any built-in navigation capabilities such as a “walk this way to next waypoint” arrow, or “x kilometres to go” status messages. Rather, every few seconds, a GPS Datalogger automatically records and saves its position. And that’s about it.

As such, a basic GPS Datalogger isn’t of much immediate use on the hill or down the dale. As a means of recording exactly where you’ve been though, it’s just the job. I should add at this point, that most standard personal GPS receivers also act as dataloggers, enabling you to record tracks of where you’ve been. A bespoke GPS Datalogger just does away with the display and navigation aspects of these devices, resulting in a much more compact gadget. Battery life too, is generally better, given that there’s no screen to power up.

GPS Datalogger (Blumax GPS-4044)

The unit pictured above measures roughly 70mm x 45mm x 20mm, and, in addition to position logging as described above, includes the following features:

• Bluetooth connectivity for uploading position data, or for providing real-time position data to another bluetooth device
• A “point of interest” button, for manually adding waypoints
• Status lights to indicate:
  • GPS tracking status
  • low-power warning
  • low-memory warning
  • bluetooth connection status

In use, one simply has to switch the unit on (ensuring it’s placed in ‘log’ mode), and then forget about it! I’m not going to review this particular GPS Datalogger in detail here — I may do so in a later post, once I’ve put it through its paces a little more — but have already noted the following:

• The unit starts tracking its position within a few seconds of being switched on. This may come as a surprise to anyone used to waiting minutes for their GPS unit to start tracking. Start-up time is greatly reduced by using Assisted-GPS (A-GPS) technology. More about A-GPS another time; for now it’s enough to note that the manufacturer has gone to the effort to support A-GPS.
• The unit seems to be very sensitive when it comes to detecting GPS signals. Much of the walk described above was through heavily wooded areas, and in deep valleys. The unit doesn’t seem to have had any trouble tracking GPS satellites, despite being inside my rucksac lid.
• Build quality is adequate, but no more. This is clearly not a “ruggedised” device. In comparison to a Garmin eTrex, which is carefully designed to deal with inclement conditions (such as being dropped, or exposure to water), this Blumax unit feels very “plasticky”. The “on” switch doesn’t have a very positive action, and feels cheap. I wouldn’t like to guess how long this unit would last if not offered the protection of an Ortlieb map-case or similar.

Using the logged location data

With a position fix recorded every five seconds, a GPS Datalogger can give you a very detailed record of a day’s walk — one that you can peruse at your leisure at a later date once you’ve uploaded the data to your computer. The data upload process is straightforward, and as the data is provided in GPX, format it’s easy to use with all sorts of mapping software.

It’s important to realise that each location record is also associated with a time. This means that, not only can you plot an accurate path of your travels on an electronic map (such as Memory Map, or using an online service such as Google Earth), but you can also review your progress throughout the day in fine detail.

I’ve discussed a number of examples from our walk in the Dales below. The screenshots are all from Google Earth, but remember that the data produced by the unit is in an open format, usable in many different ways and with a wide variety of software.

#1: “Nattering in the car park”

Car park south of Tideswell

First, it’s worth running through how Google Earth is displaying the location data from the GPS Datalogger. As well as the blue “track line”, every location point (one every five seconds) is marked with one of two symbols: an arrow  , or a square .

Google Earth displays an arrow when the following data point is far enough away that a reasonable value for the bearing can be displayed. If the following data point is closer than a threshold distance (a few metres by the looks of it), Google Earth displays the data point as a square instead .

Looking at the plotted track, the different types of markers correspond closely to the speed at which one is walking. A steady pace results in a sequence of arrows, all pointing in the direction of travel. When one slows down, or stops, the symbols change to squares, indicating that the data points are being displayed without bearing data.

So, looking at the image above, we can see the end of the track entering the Tideswell car park as a sequence of (mostly) arrows from the north, and then turning into a bunch of overlapping squares in the car park while everyone stops for a good natter (circled in red). By clicking on one of these squares at the end of the track in Google Earth, each square is expanded out into a starbust of individual points. Clicking on an individual square displays detailed information about that particular data point:

That's a lot of nattering...

Another interesting feature visible in the first image, is that the start of the track (heading south out of the car park), is inaccurate. Even though the unit starts tracking very quickly once it’s switched on, it still takes 30 seconds or so for the location readings to settle down.

#2: “Oops, Wrong Way”

Oops... wandering off at the front

The highlighted area in the above image shows what happens when the walk leader doesn’t keep close enough control of the reprobates at the front of the group — who in this case have blithely wandered off in the wrong direction before being called back. Oops.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to think of circumstances under which this ability to review a route in such precise detail could be quite useful — revisiting one’s progress and performance during a challenge event, for example?

#3: “Which Way Now?”

Up to the right, or straight on?

In the above image, there’s an obvious cluster of overlapping position markers (circled). This corresponds to some indecision with regard to the route ahead. Notice also that, as the track heads north out of the frame, the markers are mainly squares rather than bearing arrows. This is a consequence of slowing down while walking uphill!

#4: “Mmmm, Cocoa Pop caramel shortbread…”

Time for elevenses

The cluster of square markers in this image correspond to elevenses (greatly improved by a Cocoa Pop caramel shortbread “digestif”, and a member of the group expounding on the merits of various supermarket checkout operatives). By clicking on a marker either side of this cluster, we can determine that “elevenses” started at 11:40, and finished at 11:59. Twenty-to-twelveses then. I’ll be writing a letter to the walk leader…

#5: “Stile shenanigans”

Two of the many stiles...

Because the GPS Datalogger religiously records a new data point every five seconds, irrespective of one’s movements, it’s easy to see where “bunching” occurs in the group. The usual concertina effect of a group of ramblers negotiating a stile is clear in the image above.

Whatsmore, with a little detective work, I can surmise that for the first stile (bottom of the image), I was probably at the front of the group. The track there shows no slowing down before the stile, but plenty of dithering on the far side — presumably because I wasn’t sure which way to go. At the following stile, I’m probably nearer the back of the group, evidenced by more hanging about before the stile than after it.

#6: “Lunch and a pint”

Meanderings in Foolow

This image clearly shows the group’s progress through Foolow — lunching on the village green before backtracking to the pub. This is also a good indication of the accuracy of the unit. I reckon that most of the time, the recorded locations are within 3 metres of the actual location when plotted on a map. Of course, this is a very basic assessment, and takes no account whatever of possible inaccuracies in Google Earth’s registration of aerial photography. I can say with certainty however, that, whatever my GPS Datalogger indicates, I didn’t wade across the southern edge of the duckpond whilst looking for a suitable spot for lunch!

Again, timestamps are available for each data point. Thus I can see that we arrived in Foolow at 13:03, sat by the duckpond eating lunch until 13:29, and finally left the village (via the pub) at 14:09!

As a rule, and with only occasional wavering, readings are accurate enough to confirm which side of a road one walked down. Take this example:

Dithering near the A623

Here, the track accurately captures a momentary dither at the middle of this junction, before we chose which side of the road to walk down. Notice also that the location markers are slightly further apart when crossing the main A623 road (between Baslow and Chapel). Reason? A big truck was coming.

#6: “Peter’s Stone, and an entomological/mycological diversion”

Bimbling over Peter's Stone

Our route up Peter’s Stone, and subsequent meanderings on the top, are clearly shown (highlighted in red), as is some dithering shortly after descending the Stone (circled in blue), occasioned by the discovery of Six-Spot Burnet Moths, and some rancid fungus.

Download the data!

The location data can be downloaded from the unit in a standard GPX format, which is compatible with a wide variety of mapping applications. If you want to examine the detail more closely, perhaps using your own mapping software, or even walk this particular route yourself, you can grab the GPX data here (900KB).

Adding and removing links from your blogroll by hand is a waste of time if you already have a ready-to-roll data source available — the blogs you’re subscribed to through Google Reader.

The following steps explain how to create a blogroll on your WordPress blog (or Blogger account), that will automatically synchronise with the blogs you’re following in Google Reader. Provided you’re happy to publicly list your Google Reader subscriptions (or, at least, a subset of them), this trick will save you a lot of hassle.

Note that the instructions that follow assume you’re using a self-hosted WordPress blog, or have a hosted Blogger account.

Grabbing code from Google Reader

1. Open Google Reader, and log in to your account.
2. Select Settings > Reader Settings, and then the Folders and Tags tab.

   Any folders you’ve already set up to hold your blog subscriptions are listed.

   

   If you aren’t already using folders in Google Reader, you’ll need to create at least one folder to hold the subscriptions that you want to link to your blogroll.

3. Select the check box next to the folder you want to use as a blogroll, then click the Change sharing drop down, and select public.

   A number of links will now be displayed to the right of the folder details.

4. Click add a blogroll to your site.

   A new window opens — the right-hand side shows a preview of how your blogroll may look when incorporated into your blog.

5. Change the Title of the blogroll if required.
6. Select a Color scheme from the drop down list.

   A preview of the scheme you’ve chosen is shown to the right.

   For maximum visual control, select None instead of a specific colour. You can then style the blogroll separately within your blog.

7. If you want to add the blogroll to a Blogger account, click the Add to Blogger button, and follow the instructions.

   If you are using a self-hosted WordPress blog, continue with the instructions below.

8. Select the HTML snippet shown in the text box, and copy it to the clipboard (CTRL+C to copy).

Adding the code to your self-hosted WordPress blog

9. Log in to your self-hosted WordPress blog, and open the Dashboard.
10. Select Widgets from the Appearance menu.
11. Find the Text widget in the Available Widgets list, and drag it into the Sidebar list on the right.
12. In the Text window that opens, paste the code that you copied from Google Reader into the large text box (CTRL+V to paste).

    You can leave the Title field blank if you already specified a title for the blogroll code in Google Reader.

13. Click Save, then Close.

That’s it! Your blogroll will now be automatically synchronised to the subscriptions in the folder you selected from Google Reader. As you add and remove subscriptions from the folder in Google Reader, these changes will appear immediately on your blogroll!

Of course, if you use multiple folders in Google Reader to organise your subscriptions, you can create a separate auto-synchronising blogroll from each folder. This is exactly what I’ve done here on WildVista, with separate blogrolls for each of the main subjects featured.

If you have some subscriptions that you don’t want to be shown on a blogroll, just keep them in a private folder (or don’t put these subscriptions in a folder at all).

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• How to Add Your Google Reader Feeds as a Blogroll on Your Site (anneonlife.com)

Mimbo is a free, magazine-style theme for WordPress.

I particularly like the ease with which Mimbo enables one to create graphically rich feature pages. The first photo in any post is automatically detected, resized to a thumbnail, and then inserted alongside excerpt text on the home page, and within category pages. It’s this greater use of images that’s led me to drop the original banner image (though I do miss it — might have to think of a way to work it back in…).

I’ve also tweaked the default theme a fair bit, making a number of CSS style adjustments to get things layed out as I want. This has also introduced me to a feature of WordPress that I was previously unaware of — child themes. The problem with installing a new theme, and then tweaking it to meet your needs, is that, when the theme is upgraded, all these changes will be lost.

You could simply not upgrade the theme, but this isn’t likely to be a sensible approach in the long term. As the WordPress platform itself is upgraded (often to fix security-related bugs, but also to introduce useful new features), the theme you’re using may also need upgrading if it is to continue to work correctly with the latest version of WordPress. By creating a child theme, you can make wide-ranging modifications, without having to worry about redoing this work when it’s time to upgrade the theme.

I’ve really just scratched the surface when it comes to WordPress theming, but am now happy that this approach will greatly reduce the pain of future upgrades. And with that, I’ve got a bunch of draft posts in the pipeline, ready to populate my newly streamlined categories. (Not convinced the “Atmospheric Optics” category is going to make the cut though — not unless I can create considerably more content!)

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• Designing WordPress Child Themes (domainmacher.com)
• WordPress Structure and Best Practices (slideshare.net)

Other changes I wanted to make fell outside the default features available from a self-hosted WordPress installation. Enter “plugins” — tools to extend the functionality of WordPress.

Two Plugins I’ve activated or added to WildVista.com are listed below, along with a link to a page where you can download the plugin, a basic explanation of what the plugin does, and why it’s useful.

• Akismet anti-spam service for comments. Pretty obvious why you’d want this really. Spam comments on blogs are rife — often disguised as ‘genuine’ comments (e.g. “Nice blog! I’ll be visiting again!”), their real purpose often being to build a network of back-links to the spammer’s site.

  Anything that can save my time by identifying spam comments automatically is worth a look. Rather than force users to complete a CAPTCHA, Aksimet attempts to automatically detect spam comments and places them in a spam folder.

  Plenty of spam has arrived already, and Aksimet has caught it all. No false-positives yet either. Askimet is a hosted service, so if you’re hosting your own WordPress blog (i.e., not on WordPress.com), you’ll need to apply for an API key (free). Even better, Aksimet is automatically installed with the main WordPress software, so you won’t need to download it separately.



The Aksimet dashboard.

• Floatbox Plus is a very well written Plugin that adds support for inline enlargement of images (at least, that’s what I’m using it for — its capabilities extend beyond this). So much nicer than jumping to a blank window with a sorry looking image jammed up in the top left corner — the default unless you do something about it.

  Floatbox Plus is smart too. If the enlarged image is bigger than the screen real-estate available to display it, a single click enlarges the image such that it just fits the screen. A further click then expands it to full size, if that happens to be bigger. Clearly, a lot of thought and effort has gone into this.

  Floatbox Plus is free to use for non-commercial sites, but still requires a license key to prevent an occasional nag message. I requested a key a while ago, but have yet to receive one. I should probably chase that up.

I’ll post again over the next few weeks, with more information about the Plugins I’m finding useful.

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One early decision was to change WordPress’s default behaviour for displaying posts on the front page. I’ve never really got on with the enormously long lists of full posts that make up the front page of many blogs. The pages can take an age to load, and it’s hard for a new reader to get a feeling for a particular blog when they have to scroll through masses of detailed content, rather than scan a list of post titles and excerpts.

Martin (over at Postcard from Timperley) commented that he’s not keen on having to click to ‘Read more’, and this got me thinking. The result is what you’re now seeing on the front page — a hybrid approach, displaying only the most recent post in full, and then the five most recent posts as excerpts with ‘Read more’ links. I achieved this with the Homepage Excerpts plugin for WordPress, available for download from the Daily Blog Tips site. However, I think the design decision is more interesting (and more important) than the mechanics of the implementation.

You can download the Homepage Excerpts plugin from www.dailyblogtips.com

Of utmost importance with any such design decision, is to keep in mind who you’re designing for — that is, the end user (visitors to your blog); not yourself! Given that blogs and blogging entered the mainstream some 10 years ago (blogger.com went live in August 1999), the medium has developed a number of tried and trusted design patterns, most of which will become obvious to anyone that’s a regular web user with even a passing interest in blogs.

As such, the question I needed to answer, was why so many blogs have extremely long front pages consisting of full posts, and whether this common design pattern is appropriate for my own blog.

As a quick piece of research, I took a quick look at each blog on Martin’s blogroll. Of the forty or so blogs listed, only two use excerpts on the front page, with all the rest favouring full posts, and consequently have very long front pages in many cases.

Most of these fit the ‘personal journal’ style of blog, and I can see how such a chronological diary is reasonably well presented as an extended page of full posts. I remained unconvinced that a blog consisting of often unrelated posts or mini-articles on a selection of subjects (the way WildVista is likely to go), without an implicit chronology, is well served by this approach.

The next step was to review others’ thoughts on this. Googling for “blog full posts vs excerpts” did the job. Once I’d sifted out all the hits that were about how to implement excerpted posts as opposed to why one might choose to do this, I could get a better understanding of the merits of each approach.

The following are links to relevant articles or posts, most of which have associated comments that are helpful. I’d recommend you take a look at these if you’re also wrestling with the ‘full posts or excerpts on my front page’ decision:

• Full Posts vs Partial Posts, on the Homepage (at Pro Blog Design)
• Full Posts or Excerpts on your Blog homepage? (at BlogCatalog)
• Full posts or excerpts? (at Upstart Blogger)
• Post excerpts on the Homepage? (at Daily Blog Tips)
• Daily Blog Tips Now Features Post Excerpts on the Homepage (also at Daily Blog Tips)
• Excellent Uses of Excerpts in Blog Design (Vandelay Design Blog)

It’s worth pointing out that I’m not at this point considering the benefits or otherwise of excerpting posts in RSS feeds, rather than on the front page of a blog. What commentary I’ve seen on this seems to come down pretty solidly on the side of not excerpting feeds, so I’ll double check what’s going on with my own RSS feeds later.

Reviewing the links I’ve presented, I guess I could be guilty of a degree of confirmation bias. Nonetheless, there are a number of points made in the linked articles and comments that have helped me decide on the hybrid approach I’ve taken for now:

• Length of posts — time will tell, but I’m not expecting to be posting any very short posts (500 words per post is what I’m aiming for currently as a minimum), nor posts that consist just of a photo or two. Such posts certainly have their place on personal ‘journal’ type blogs, but that’s not where I want to take WildVista. I’m not considering mobile blogging from ‘the road’ either. So, excerpting most posts on the front page feels like the right thing to do. If I feel the need to post smaller items at a higher frequency, there’s always Twitter…
• User expectations — blogs are ’supposed’ to consist of a front page of un-excerpted posts that users scroll through. The more I read, the more I’m convinced that this applies specifically to journal-type blogs that have a strong chronological thread, and probably a loyal and relatively small readership. For blogs presenting more in the way of standalone articles or featurettes (that probably don’t have a much of a chronological flow to them), excerpts will provide the scanability (and can offer ‘teasers’) that is much harder to achieve with a lengthy page of full posts.
• Clear signposting — if using excerpts, the signposting to ‘Read more’ needs to be very clear. As things currently stand on WildVista, I think this particular navigation item is too subtle, so I’ll be looking into restyling this.
• Scope for use of images/magazine-style excerpts — I really like the idea of producing graphically interesting excerpts, and perhaps even laying things out more like the contents page of a magazine-style site. I couldn’t consider doing this without excerpting.

There were a few other points that kept coming up, specifically, advantages of excerpts with search engine optimization (SEO), and increased click rates. Neither of these are a driving factor for me at the moment. As I stated earlier, I want to get the user experience right, and I think posting the latest post in full, with excerpts for the next five posts, will be an improvement.

What do you think? Full posts, excerpts, or a combination of both? And how strongly should this decision be based on the type of content on a blog?

Time to dig a bit deeper then. With the edit and post functionality already taken care of, and having explored the various settings and options to make sure everything looks sensible, I reckon theming is the first thing to take a look at.

Now, as you’d probably expect, WordPress comes with a powerful and easy-to-use theming system. What this means is that, given an extensive directory of free themes, it’s the work of just a few mouse clicks within the WordPress dashboard to apply any of these themes to the entire site.

WordPress themes are easy to install: simply download the theme’s component files, and dump them in the wp-content/themes/ directory. The newly installed theme then automatically appears in the Themes section of the Appearance panel in the WordPress Dashboard.

So, what does changing the theme do? Here’s an example comparison of the front page rendered using the standard (and currently applied) “default” theme, and using the “Fusion” theme:

WildVista blog with Default WordPress theme

WildVista blog with Fusion WordPress theme

It’s not clear from the above screengrabs, but “default” is a fixed-width theme, whereas “fusion” (for this basic test at least) is a flexible-width theme. So, themes aren’t limited to controlling discrete elements such as the typeface or background images and colours, but also the dynamic layout characteristics.

It’s one thing downloading free themes and applying them to your WordPress site, but to achieve a specific look for your pages, it’ll be necessary to modify an existing theme, or create your own from scratch.

For the WildVista blog, I certainly want to move away from the default theme I’ve started with. There’s nothing wrong with it per se — indeed, it’s a very clean and clear design — but it’s not personal, and it’s used by myriad other blogs.

Before getting into the technicalities of creating a bespoke theme, it’s worth taking a step back, and thinking about how best to approach the job. The basic steps are:

1. Design
2. Implement
3. Test

For the design step, it’s best to step away from the computer. Pen and paper are all that’s needed to start sketching out various layouts. There’s no need at all to be getting bogged down in HTML or CSS at this stage; the technical implementation can take a back seat for now. Sure, there may be some aspects of a given design that turn out to be very difficult to implement in a WordPress theme, but right now, I don’t want my designs hampered by unnecessary restrictions.

Now, I’d better go find that pencil sharpener…